Working for an indian code sweatshop. The job you've got by bribing the University headmaster to give you a degree without ever attending class. Your uncle who worked at the sweatshop as a manager already gave you the job by bribing his boss.
After a half a year on the bench you've beeing sent off for a contract for the USA. You moved to Seattle where you've "coded" the software for the Boeing 737 Max Airplane. Your code downed 2 airplanes. You're responsible for the death of 350+ people. You're alone and the US is foreign to you and you're missing your mothers indian food. And you wish you could soothe your pain with some freshly pressed sugar cane drink and a jalebi from your favorite food joint back home.

This is oddly specific

too real

Only the last bit is unrealistic here. A 15 minute Uber to Redmond and you're basically back in Mumbai.

For a disaster like boeings its never a single person responsibility.

In such a project there should be layers upon layers of qa, testing and best practices to follow to as much as possible remove the risk of failure.

Boeing has proven that this is a systematic organization problem with how they tackle projects and even Nasa is waking up and questioning Boeings approach.

It is nit a coding error but a joint design error. Multiple short cuts that together caused the problem.

Like using only a single sensor and trusting it above the pilots attempt to correct the error.

No coder can be held responsible and guessing from the scope, would not have been allowed to se he whole picture anyway, they might have objected ...

@Voxera
It's not really shortcuts that hurt them as much as cost-relative corner cutting. The management are largely early 90s business types doing everything they can to save money. That's the root of the problem: the perception that businesses can't just grow the bottom line, you have to save money through lowered expenses.

It's a small skilled professional world here, and I live two miles from Boeing. Personally knowing a number of the engineers there, and listening to their laments over beers, the management has critically hamstrung any efforts at quality they have and dwindled their numbers sufficiently that I'm surprised any of their planes still fly at all.

As this is a dev site for ranting, it's not unexpected that some would focus on the development aspects of the failure predominantly, as is the tongue in cheek hyperbole evinced in this post.

That said, the most egregious portion of this situation to my mind *is* the replacement of tenured engineers who are domain experts with some of the cheapest resources a body shop had to offer. It was the formal manifestation of the infection that had spread company wide over the years. The management had this hubristic idea that the remaining high level engineers could plow through the code and ensure quality. Not only does that not remotely take into account the fatigue of those resources, it completely ignores the massive hit to morale and what that makes people do. In the end the management there invited their own destruction and tried to scream "et tu, brute?" when it collapsed in on them.

The whole situation is a little personal to me, as they're a major employer where I live. You're absolutely right that there's plenty of blame to go around. As usual, very little of it lands on those who are actually responsible and the bad behavior continues. The system is literally engineered to obfuscate the source of failure so no one is to blame.

Gold

Huh I expected some angry comments from indian devRanters

@heyheni the sweatshop is reality, unfortunately. And we know that.
But hey, if its angry comments you're after, I can oblige. 😅